Special delivery: Italy’s postman joins the AI infrastructure race

Italy has picked an unlikely champion to develop its technology infrastructure and protect digital sovereignty: its national postman.

Poste Italiane, the postal service which pays out pensions through 12,600 post offices that are as much a feature of remote towns as the local church, is betting on its €13.5 billion ($15.4 billion) bid for Telecom Italia (TIM) to accelerate its shift into digital, telecom and cloud services.

Two-thirds owned by the state, Poste started its digital transformation in the early 2000s, venturing into electronic payments. Over the past decade it has signed up 30 million users – around 70% of the total – to Italy’s digital ID system to access public services online.